Owing to the distributed nature of the resources they offer, datacenters can be viewed, from one vantage point, as networks. In accordance with this first viewpoint, statistics about network traffic may measure some aspects of datacenter performance and may diagnose some problems in datacenters. However, datacenters can also function as a coordinated whole in providing parallel processing and/or storage services. A second, more comprehensive, viewpoint can be advisable to take into account this coordination, together with non-network computing resources, various characteristics of tasks and/or portions of tasks performed by datacenters, and/or other considerations, such as task priorities, at play in an engaged datacenter.
In addition to the interrelated nature of nodes in a datacenter, the sheer size of datacenters can make traditional approaches to providing data problematic just with respect to network traffic. Additionally, salient metrics relevant to the performance and/or problems associated with a datacenter may be unrelated to the networks in general. Classifications describing tasks engaged in by a datacenter, and/or implementation details for those tasks, often are not present in traditional traffic statistics and/or cannot be collected by existing techniques. As a result, data to more fully characterize performance and diagnose issues in datacenters are not available.